A Beijing Summer

Bofang Zhou

Word Count 1034

I never expected to spend a summer sharing my single dorm bed with four two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. But that’s what survival looked like in my early twenties.

My college sat in the oldest part of Beijing, tucked deep inside the tourist-filled Hutongs. Each morning, visitors rolled past on three-wheeled pedicabs with their cameras raised. I sometimes wondered how many vacation albums I’ve accidentally appeared in - hair unbrushed, eyes swollen, rushing to class with a steamed bao half in my mouth.

The electrical wiring in our neighborhood was too old to support air conditioning - or so the school told us. Beijing summers grew hotter each year; some nights stayed above ninety degrees well past midnight. The dorm rooms turned into sealed jars. Students had two choices: press their spines against the cool wall and hug oversized bottles of chilled liquid, or give up on sleep altogether and flee into the night.

For art students, sleeplessness was almost fashionable. Actors dressed for clubs and danced until dawn. Playwrights adopted a nearby game bar as their unofficial library, arguing over scripts between rounds of cheap beer. I belonged to neither group - the first seemed to gather the twenty most beautiful young adults in the country, and you definitely did not want to be seen near them; the second revolved around a student writer known for only composing elaborate stories about rabbits and pigeons.

I was alone, often. I avoided my roommates, and they avoided me. We had all grown up as only children; now we lived inches apart, learning to resent one another politely.

The Hutongs drew me in instead. Deeper inside, the alleys narrowed and darkened; tourists rarely wandered this far. At the end of a dead-end lane, you might find a hidden Tibetan bar, a coded door to a sex club, or an old woman sitting in silence, watching as if you were the intruder.

I found The Attic.

It wasn’t really its name - it didn’t have one. The room was small and crowded, but the ceiling rose unexpectedly high, as if the space had stretched upward in defiance of its half-basement body. Two French friends had turned the damp, faintly sour underground room - no bathroom, barely any ventilation - into a café by day and, after midnight, whatever the night asked of it. Like my dorm, it had no air conditioning. The heat gathered and lingered. Whether a folk singer was playing Cucurrucucú Paloma to a restless dozen, or an Italian woman performing stand-up in fluent Chinese, the air was thick with breath and sweat.

I hated brushing against strangers’ skin. Still, I kept returning. I liked being there. I didn’t speak much. In The Attic, as at school, I remained awkward. I was present but peripheral. I let it be that way.

One day I noticed a narrow ledge in the back above everyone’s heads - a shallow loft where you couldn’t stand upright. It was less a room than a pause in the architecture. So I climbed. At five-foot-four, in a world built for taller bodies, climbing had long been a survival skill. I pulled myself into that pocket of air and quietly claimed it.

No one stopped me. The owners never asked questions, never insisted I order anything, never commented on the girl who kept disappearing above the crowd. Not long after, I found two thin cushions waiting there, as if the space had adjusted to my presence.

I had never found another place that fit me so precisely. I was inside the room but slightly removed from it. I didn’t want to be alone, but I couldn’t bear standing shoulder to shoulder either. Two feet above everyone else was the exact distance my body required. Most people didn’t notice me. I would lie on my back and drift toward sleep, suspended above the murmuring conversations, listening to other people’s lives unfold beneath me. From there I once watched a roommate’s French boyfriend flirt with a woman directly below. He struggled through elaborate Mandarin sentences that didn’t quite hold together. I almost corrected him. Then I noticed the thinning patch at the crown of his head. He couldn’t have been twenty-five. I stayed quiet. Later, I told my roommate only that her boyfriend was balding.

Summer thinned out eventually. The heat broke, the bottles disappeared from my bed, and my night wanderings through the Hutongs came to an end. On the first morning of the fall semester, I walked back onto campus in air that finally felt breathable. Actors spilled out of rehearsal rooms, shouting into the pale light as if the sun required an announcement. I had never understood that impulse - to push your voice outward, to make it reach something. Even now, visibility unsettles me; being seen feels indistinguishable from being exposed. My most awkward moments have involved exactly that: standing in a wedding dress I didn't choose, watching someone I wasn't sure I loved walk toward me, and crouching like a turtle in a black box theater, praying for a passing grade so I would never have to take another acting class.

Ten years after graduation, that same roommate came to New York for an advertisement project. I visited her Airbnb in Long Island City - a dull neighborhood of glass towers and wide, indifferent streets. She handed me an ice cream and turned up the central air. It was July, and the room was so comfortably cooled it made me uneasy. I took the ice cream, though I haven’t liked sweets since childhood. I couldn’t blame her for not knowing that. I had never let her know me well.

She is married now - to someone with a full head of hair. She knows nothing about The Attic. She seems content.

Out of nowhere she asked, “Do you remember the playwright who only wrote about rabbits and pigeons?”

I did.

“She made a few shows no one understood,” my roommate said. “Then she checked herself into a psych ward. After that, no one heard from her. A few months ago someone found out she’s living in a Shaolin temple in the mountains. A kung fu master now, apparently.”

"That's strange," I said. 

The ice cream was melting. I let it.

Bofang is a Chinese bilingual writer and theater professional. She won top prizes in China’s national competitions for violin, writing, and classical Chinese language, and studied music and theater in Beijing, Paris, and New York. She now works in theater production in New York and has recently begun writing in English. Her debut publication appeared in The Sun Magazine, and her plays have been produced at Theater for the New City and The Chain Theatre in New York, among others. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her violin and forty plants.